Islam and Christianity may come together in music but the pope, in his book on Jesus, draws one clear dividing line

THIS is an unusual moment in religious history. In late June, even as Muslims in Pakistan were expressing outrage over the knighthood that Queen Elizabeth is to confer on the “blasphemous” author Salman Rushdie, respected representatives of the Christian Western world were acknowledging the power and beauty of Islamic spirituality.

Westminster Cathedral, Britain's chief place of Roman Catholic worship, offered the shimmering mosaics of its quasi-Byzantine interior as the setting for “The Beautiful Names”, a new composition by Sir John Tavener. The 99 names of God, taken from the Koran, were sung in Arabic and the inspiring, guttural sounds of the language had been diligently mastered by English singers more used to Bach or Handel. The work had been commissioned by Prince Charles, who will one day succeed his mother as head of the Anglican church but cherishes a deep interest in Islam.

On the pavement outside the cathedral, a few Catholics staged a peaceful protest, arguing that because Islam rejected basic Christian doctrines—such as the Trinity and the divinity of Christ—it had no place in a church. But most of the British establishment seemed to be inside, enjoying the singing. The cathedral authorities insisted that what had taken place was an artistic performance, not an act of worship.

The Catholics' ultimate boss, Pope Benedict, is less flexible. He may feel that because we live in an age when acts of religious accommodation are possible—and, for the sake of world peace, necessary—it is more important than ever to draw doctrinal lines in the sand. In his recently published book “Jesus of Nazareth”, he seems to be saying that “much as we respect one another and accept one another's right to exist, there are important things on which we cannot agree.”

The pope's elegantly, almost tenderly written essay on the founder of his faith is less obviously polemical in tone than his lecture in Germany last September. This outraged Muslim opinion by quoting a Byzantine emperor who had called Islam irrational and violent (the pope later apologised for the offence his remarks had caused but stopped short of withdrawing them). Yet his book remains uncompromising in its insistence on the divinity of Jesus Christ, and hence in its rejection of arguments to the contrary put forward by liberal Christians, or indeed by Muslims and Jews.

Pope Benedict takes issue with a powerful body of conventional wisdom among revisionist scholars of the New Testament. This school starts by making an undeniable point: the contrast in tone between the “synoptic” gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke—which emphasise the story of Jesus's life as a teacher and healer—and the mystical language of John's gospel (as well as many of the Pauline epistles) which meditate on the divinity of Christ rather than the particular things he did or said. Some modern readings of the New Testament go on to argue that “the historical Jesus” of the first three gospels is not really portrayed as divine at all; and that the divinity of Christ, which is so emphasised by John and Paul, represents a later doctrine that was artificially bolted on to the basic story of Jesus's life.

The pope will have none of this. He insists that the divinity of Christ is very much present in the first three gospels, and that the gospel of John, for all its mysticism, does contain a reliable first-hand historical account of the life of Jesus. In making the first half of this case, he finds himself going head to head—with perfect courtesy, it should be said—with some Jewish critiques of the New Testament.

Whatever Jesus was, the pope argues, he was not simply a free-thinking rabbi who told people to lighten up and ignore the finer points of the Mosaic law. On the contrary, he saw the law of Moses as God-given and supremely important—and it was only because of his own divinity that he had the right to reinterpret that law. In other words, the teachings of Jesus and his divinity are inseparable. That means there is no avoiding a hard argument with those who deny his divinity: either he was the Son of God, and entitled to remake God's law, or he was an impostor.

What emerges from the pope's style of argument is a profound distrust of liberalism and watering-down of any kind. He has no time for the suggestion that Jesus was merely a good human being who offered an interesting new interpretation of Jewish teaching that had become excessively rigid or chauvinist. He respects tough-minded Jews, who do not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, more than woolly conciliators from any side.

Oddly enough Sir John Tavener, the builder of religious bridges through music, says something similar. He has been influenced by a school of thought which maintains that all rigorously followed religious traditions somehow converge at the “summit” of human experience, whatever disagreements may exist lower down. So Sir John admires the traditionalism and rigour of Pope Benedict—just as he admires the traditionalism and rigour of the equivalent schools of Islam and Judaism.

Fine—but how far is it really possible for people who disagree about a matter to which they ascribe supreme importance to admire one another's integrity and rigour? That question may be easier to answer in music than it is in prose.